ASIC’s Standard Business Reporting (SBR)

ASIC has acknowledged that its current reporting requirements impose a significant burden on business – a burden that the Australian Government wants to reduce – which is being addressed through a new Standard Business Reporting (SBR) program.

SBR is a multi-agency initiative that aims to simplify business-to-government reporting by:

• Making government forms easier to understand
• Using accounting/record keeping software to automatically pre-fill government forms; and
• Introducing a single secure way to interact on-line with participating agencies.

Government agencies participating in the SBR program include the Australian Treasury, Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), Australian Security and Investments Commission (ASIC), Australian Taxation Office (ATO) and all state and territory government revenue offices.

The SBR program is focusing on financial reporting first, as it considers that these forms affects most businesses, including forms such as the Business Activity Statement (Australian Taxation Office) and the (6) ASIC forms related to lodgement of financial reports by companies.

The major work being undertaken in the SBR implementation includes:

• Standardisation of reporting terms;
• Development of a reporting taxonomy;
• Standardisation of relationships between accounting terms and information reportable to Government;
• Mapping of reporting rules and relationships to a business’s accounts within their accounting/record-keeping system;
• Development of SBR core services
• Connecting government agency systems to the core services; and
• Education and two-way communication with business, software developers and business intermediaries.

ASIC’s SBR project is aimed to benefit for both business and ASIC, with the key objectives to:

1. Reduce costs for lodgers through simpler lodgement processes
2. Improve services for investors and investment advisors by having financial data available in a format that supports automated analysis
3. Reduce costs for lodgers and for ASIC by providing whole-of-government infrastructure supporting services such as authentication
4. Improve compliance through providing lodgers with enhanced services, including reminders on when lodgements are due
5. Improve timeliness of processing by ASIC
6. Reduce overall processing costs for ASIC
7. Bring ASIC into line with global benchmark regulators (such as Singapore, US and UK) that already accept lodgements of financial statements in XBRL format
8. Enhance ASIC’s reputation as a modern regulator, providing systems that are simple and easy to use.

ASIC aims to complete its SBR program by March 2011.

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